Review: Huntington delivers dark, poignant 'Our Town'

In his award-winning 2009 reimagining of "Our Town" that played for two years off-Broadway, acclaimed director David Cromer brings to the Huntington a look at life that goes far beyond sentimental Americana,

BOSTON — Many people remember "Our Town" as a charmer, a thought-provoking reflection on what's important in life through the lens of the small country town of Grover's Corners, N.H., at the turn of the 20th century. Thornton Wilder's classic is accessible and beloved enough that, according to information from Huntington Theatre company, there is a production playing somewhere in the United States (often a high school) every day of the year.

The 1938 play's three acts look at the seemingly simple lives revolving around the Webb and Gibbs households: family, work, school, neighbors, choir practice, baseball, shelling beans. The story of the town — three acts of Daily Life, Love and Marriage, Death and Eternity — is usually told with folksy wisdom by a narrator called the Stage Manager, a man described at the start of Wilder's script as wearing a hat, smoking a pipe and checking a pocket watch.

But in his award-winning 2009 reimagining of "Our Town" that played for two years off-Broadway, acclaimed director David Cromer brings to the Huntington a look at life that goes far beyond sentimental Americana, that is as dark as it is poignant. And he creates a Stage Manager himself who is anything but folksy. This is no angel Clarence waking up George Bailey to the meaning of every day; Cromer takes the title of his role at face value. He shows up on the stage in jeans and a buttoned-down shirt, yellow legal pad and pen ready for notes, checking his cell phone to make sure of the time of day being depicted.

His tone is matter-of-fact, even brusque. He's a busy guy, setting a scene, passing on information, telling a story. He seems somewhat remote and in a hurry, and when he pauses on a particular thought, there is not the omniscient wisdom often associated with this role but more of a regret or wistfulness as he, too, recognizes the tragedy, loss, beauty or futility in the small moments and details of everyone's lives.

Cromer puts this famously set-less play within the audience, with all the lights on; this is, after all, our town and, really, our story. The tables and chairs used to represent the Gibbs-Webb houses are on the floor, with audience chairs arranged on three sides and much-used walkways carved out after the first row of chairs. Audience members are spoken to directly, the drugstore proprietor hands young George Gibbs two invisible ice cream sodas over patrons' heads during George's courting scene with Emily Webb.

There are few props, and the cast is mostly dressed in jeans, T-shirts, hoodies. No remote period piece, this, with no broad accents. But with the touches and twists that Cromer uses to make this production so true to the story yet such a departure, this "Our Town" does evoke nostalgia as well as recognition of modern times.

"Our Town" has a cast of 33, mostly Boston actors, including Stacy Fischer (as a no-nonsense Mrs. Webb) and Alex Pollock (as quiet, respectful milkman Howie Newsome), both locally known from Harbor Stage Company and Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. Most of the actors have small roles, just a few scenes or lines, but successfully give a memorable flavor to small-town life — and death.

The staging on a rectangle necessarily gives audience members different vantage points for various scenes, different chances to appreciate the nuances the actors give their characters and actions. I was two rows and the walkway away from the Gibbs house, and was particularly touched by how much Melinda Lopez's small expressions said about the underlying loneliness in her marriage to the sometimes volatile Doc Gibbs (Craig Mathers). Derrick Trumbly is wrenching as young George Gibbs, flailing in his uncertain efforts to grow into a good man, and his interactions with Therese Plaehn's emotions-on-her-sleeve Emily Webb are the heart of what makes this play special.

Christopher Tarjan projects both good humor and broad compassion as newspaper editor Mr. Webb, and some of his scenes show how Cromer masterfully uses pauses, sometimes protracted ones, to say as much as any line of dialogue. Audience perspective is no roadblock for Nael Nacer as drunken choirmaster Simon Stimson: He creates a man so broken by life's tragedies that his pain can be felt from a ceiling-high choir loft or in a wordless walk across the stage.

While Wilder's play has a wedding, a funeral and a scene of momentous decision for two young people, it is largely filled with what seem in our lives to be unremarkable moments or throw-away conversations. Editor Webb, describing Grover's Corners for the audience, notes, "It's a very ordinary town, if you ask me."

But this play has always shown that no town really is, and Cromer's rethinking of Wilder's messages deepens that knowledge, as well as the sadness inherent in being human. The script may be 75 years old, but Cromer — as both director and actor — shows there are still new revelations, often tough-to-face ones, to gain from it.

Note: Cromer will be replaced by Joel Colodner in the role of the Stage Manager on Dec. 31.